by D. D. Mayers
All we had to do now was get ourselves to the Stuttgart factory at the appointed time and date. Easy you may think, but no, nothing is ever easy when newly paraplegic, and nothing would have been achievable without the efforts and determination of my ever stalwart and ingenious Little wife.
By the time we received the call to say the car would be ready for collection, we were back in London living with our wonderful fairy godmother, Marriott. By chance, my wife’s younger brother Alexander was off skiing in his camper-van. He suggested, with a small deviation, he could drop us off on the way. Wonderful. Setting off to Stuttgart, to collect a new Mercedes Car, was almost as exciting and daunting as setting off to India to find an unknown Guru to tell me all my ills would be over. For a newly injured paraplegic, confined to the limitations of a wheelchair, to be given the power and freedom of a modern motor car, is as to be given wings.
We’d found a somewhat inexpensive hotel in the centre of the city that catered to our needs. It was from there we sallied forth exploring for a couple of days prior to the collection of the vehicle. That evening, while pushing about the central square, we came upon a very friendly, welcoming little restaurant, whose light white, cold Riesling house wine was irresistibly inviting. I’m coming up to the central component of this little tale, that always brings you down-to-earth, whenever you think you might have got the hang of things. The house wine there had a very low percentage alcohol, so polishing off a litre carafe around delicious food, served with such grace and warmth, was quickly replaced, by another carafe. All too soon we’d come to the end of our lovely evening, so I called for the bill. While taking out the money from my bumbag, I glanced down at the very pretty tiled floor. Oddly, underneath the table and all around us, was a great pool of clear, pale yellow water with a strangely reminiscent odour. I said to my wife, ‘I wonder where on earth all this water...’ I didn’t finish the question, we just looked at each other and froze. Simultaneously, we knew. Oh God! I slammed down a wad of money, and we fled. We didn’t stop fleeing for five minutes. Crashing up and down curbs, racing across streets without looking either way, until we were both sagging from lack of breath. If they’d cared to follow, we wouldn’t have been hard to find. A trail of slightly pungent liquid which was now beginning to form another pool led directly to the open tap of the bag on my left leg. I hope to goodness, the wad of money slammed on the table, adequately compensated for the awfulness I’d left behind, and I can now only apologise profusely.
A taxi deposited us at the collection point. It wasn’t long before a deep, dense brown, bright new, gleaming, Mercedes 300 D, purred into view and stopped directly in front of us. Suddenly, there it was, majestically awaiting its owners. The driver, with an air of bored nonchalance quickly showed us about the car, as though it were something people did every day. He was right, of course, not only did people do it every day, as far as he was concerned, they did it every hour of every day. As he threw us the keys while walking away, he said over his shoulder, ‘And read the manual before you leave.’ Read the manual before you leave, it takes two years to read a manual.
We were alone with our beautiful new car. I slowly wheeled around it just looking at it. Odd, when you come to think of it, an inanimate lump of metal, but for most of us, buying a new car, is one of the major investments of our lifetime. We opened our doors with the softest, almost soundless of pulls, and slowly climbed in. The indescribable smell of new leather upholstery is, well, indescribable, it’s like no other, it is simply ‘plush’. It wasn’t for another forty years, when our Dear Uncle Peter, five years before he died, said, ‘I’d like you to have the pleasure of smelling the interior of a brand-new car again,’ So he bought us a sparkling new VW Passat estate with beige leather upholstery and a walnut dashboard. We sat together in the new car, inhaled, then laughed out loud. There wasn’t any point in explaining the joke to the mystified salesman. An expensive joke!
Sitting behind the wheel of this glorious new car produced the same reaction as it did, all those years later with Uncle Peter in the sparkling Passat. We looked at each other and laughed out loud. The pleasure of driving in this faultlessly designed machine, lasted for seventeen, totally trouble free years, covering more than two hundred and fifty thousand miles.
One of the many banes of a paraplegic’s life is how to prevent a pressure sore forming, on your bum, from sitting too long in one position. We’d been taught to raise ourselves, by pushing down on the chair’s arm-pads, once every ten minutes, and to stay raised for ten seconds. That’s all very well in theory, but in practice, it’s not really feasible.
In those days, cushions weren’t designed as they are today. Then, what was thought to be the best, was thick sheepskin over a softish piece of foam. Sounds ideal, so that’s what I had. However, if you don’t do your lifting, you’ll more than likely get a red patch at the end of the sacral bone, in the middle of each skeletal bum cheek. If a red patch isn’t immediately acted upon, by not sitting on it, it could take up to six months of lying on your stomach for it to heal.
By the end of the first day, even though we’d frequently stopped for a ten-second lift, I had a dangerous red patch at the end of the sacral bone on my right bum cheek. If it didn’t soften from angry red to a pale pink, within an hour, you have a problem. ‘Ground control, we have a problem.’ It still hadn’t gone by the morning. Fortunately, my little wife had her driving licence with her, foreseeing such a problem. She took over the driving for the second day while I lay flat, with the back of the passenger seat down, my body rolled to the left to take all pressure off that dangerous red patch. She wasn’t used to driving on the wrong side of the road in the right side of the car! So we made slow progress. She did however, enjoy the power and lightness of this beautifully designed machine as much as I did. She drove it frequently when we lived in the East End of London in our extraordinary Warehouse on the River, and there after.
It didn’t matter in the slightest making such slow progress, we might as well have taken forever. Our second night stop was memorable for all the wrong reasons. The little hotel had a ground floor room in a very pretty little village, I don’t remember where, on the edge of a wandering stream. The menu sounded delicious and a carafe of red wine would go down a treat. The red patch had thankfully started to fade so I’d probably be free to drive the following morning.
Before supper we both thought it would be very luxurious to have a lovely hot bath in the deep, roll topped bath invitingly awaiting. Generally, we shared the same water, my wife would get in first because she liked it very hot, then I’d get in after her when the water had cooled sufficiently for me. A habit left over from my childhood in the Kedong Valley, due to the scarcity of hot water. Tonight though, I said, ‘I’ll get in first, you can top it up with hot water if you need to.’ One of the many things I was taught by my pretty blonde physiotherapist Sally, at Stoke Mandeville hospital, was to be able to get in and out of almost any bath. The most difficult is a sunken bath. How on earth do you get, from the bottom of a sunken bath, a foot below ground level, back into your chair? I can’t tell you but I still, after forty years in a wheelchair, manage, if necessary, due entirely to Sally’s teaching.
I ran the hot water and took off my clothes. That’s not as easy as it sounds. To take off your clothes while sitting in them, and only moving your legs by picking them up, was again, taught to me by Sally. But it does take longer than just, ‘taking off your clothes’. I returned to the bath naked. It was more than half full. I cannot think why, but I didn’t test the water before starting to get in. I faced the bath, on the side, about halfway down, with the taps on the right. I picked up my left leg and placed the foot into the water. I couldn’t feel anything, but I noticed it suddenly turned a peculiar colour and the skin was bubbling. I put my hand in the water. Oh God, it was scalding, it might as well have been boiling. Even my fingers, in that mini second, were burnt. I hauled my foot out, but it was too late.
The whole foot was a bubbling, sulphurous mass of half cooked meat. I almost fainted at the sight if it. I nearly fell out of the chair, saving myself in the nick of time. My wife immediately knew something was wrong. She came running naked into the bathroom. She took one look at my foot, and sank to her knees with a gasp of horror, holding her face in her hands, ‘Oh no, Oh no, we must put it under the cold tap.’ That was easier said than done. I had to manoeuvre the chair to be nearer the taps. I had put my legs down on to the footplates before I could move the chair. It was impossible to lower the level of the water, the plug didn’t have a chain. I finally reached the cold water tap and ran the water over the foot. There was nothing else to do. My wife couldn’t say anything. Her face was drained of colour. She dressed as quickly as she could, and flew from the room. At the front desk, they realised there was an emergency and she needed a doctor. Quite soon, considering, the doctor arrived on a Vesper scooter. He took one look at my foot, “Oh Mon Dieu,” His first reaction was that I could feel it, and put his hand on my forehead to comfort me. He knew exactly what to do for the foot. He hurriedly wrote a prescription and somehow explained it was for a cream that must be applied every two hours for the next two days. The chemist was closed, but he rang them and explained the dire necessity. The chemist wasn’t in walking distance. My poor little wife had to drive our brand-new beast, into an unknown village, in the dark, find the chemist, who expected her, get the cream and find her way back to the hotel.
I’d completely ruined what would have been a lovely evening, bringing to an end a very successful little trip. Now we slunk back, our tails dragging on the floor, to our burrow in the Mews, to be comforted by our wonderful Marriott. On hearing the dreadful tale she immediately opened a bottle of champagne. She always kept on ice, ‘Forget all that, darlings, forget all that, here’s to the new freedom your beautiful new car will bring.’ We finished the bottle then she rustled up a delightful supper washed down with a couple of bottles of red wine. What an amazing person. I don’t know what we would have done without her.
Prep School
If I could divide my life into chapters, the first chapter would be from the time I could first remember until I was nine. At nine I was sent away to a boarding preparatory school, about a hundred miles away from the beauty and perfection of the Kedong Valley. I didn’t appreciate the actual beauty at that age, but I know my sister and I felt it deeply. Occasionally we were taken to children’s parties and I distinctly remember wondering why the parents of my ‘friends’ had chosen to live in the manner they were. Their houses were right next to other houses, the houses themselves were alright, but why so small. And the garden was so small there was nowhere you could possibly hide or build structures. Usually, there was only one tree, can you imagine, just one tree? Nothing to climb, no natural swimming pool, there was no warm water silently rising through little holes at the bottom of the pool. And where did the cook get his fresh fish?
So when I arrived at this preparatory school, after an endless train journey and hours in rickety old lorries on terrible roads. I stood in the middle of a long room, crammed with beds on both sides and I thought, if my Mummy and Daddy, who I loved more than anything in the world, other than my ayah of course, and I knew loved me, could see where they’d sent me, they’d realise they’d made an awful mistake.
It wasn’t a mistake and this sort of thing went on and on and on both there and in England until I was seventeen. One day very close to the end of a wonderful holiday, we were in my Aunt’s extraordinarily beautiful house overlooking the whole creek where the big ships came in to unload their cargo in Mombasa harbour. I said to my mother, rhetorically really, ‘do I have to go back to school?’ She said ‘of course, not Darling, not if you don’t want to.’ I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. I held my breath. ‘I’ll ring the Headmaster as soon as we get upcountry.’ I thought, I wonder if I’d asked this earlier, would I have got the same response? Have I endured nine years of absolute hell just for the lack of asking!
***
That was the second chapter. The first chapter is really quite brief because it was so idyllic. We lived in this extraordinarily beautiful place. It was like living in the Garden of Eden. My brother sold it to a wealthy Indian family who do seem to realise what a gem they’ve acquired. It is an oasis, with dry dusty scrub all around. From this parched landscape you burst upon a luscious water world, with huge wild fig trees, long elegant boughs sweeping down to touch the water with a kiss. A long natural pool, maybe a hundred yards long by about twenty-five wide, where the water is crystal clear and the whole pool is teeming with tilapia and freshwater bass. Above and below the long main pool there are other smaller pools with the water tumbling out over the rocks between them. A profusion of massive water ferns and exotic native water flowers throw out a rainbow of misty colour through the dappled light allowed to twinkle by the foliage of the majestic wild fig trees high above.
All around this staggering setting there are huge open, bright green lawns with high terraces set into the hillside so the lawns could be flat. At the bottom of each terrace, of which the support walls are made of lava rocks found all around in the scrub, there are deep flower beds filled to overflowing with the most colourful exotic and cultivated flowers and foliage. People seeing it for the first time just stand and gape, wordless. Stone steps are cut into each terrace taking you to the top plinth where the house is built, also made from hand-cut grey lava. The view from the house veranda looks out over the magnificent garden and river and on to the floor of the great Rift Valley, teeming with plains game. In the distance, proudly standing nine and a half thousand feet high, is the volcanic Mount Longanot. Extinct but still producing enough steam to turn turbines that will keep Nairobi going with all the electricity it needs, well into the future. But I digress, back to the garden. A ribbon of fig trees that follows the river down on to the valley floor is a pathway for troop after troop of monkeys and baboons. The most delightful are the Columbus. Their long, floating black-and-white designer gear makes them look as though they’re leaping from branch to branch in slow motion. The Vervets, the Sykes and Baboons, squabble a bit, but only out of ‘attitude’, nothing serious. There was ample for all to go round; until the end of the season when our orchards would be raided! Then, of course, there was the array of birds, water birds immediately on and around the long pool. The Kingfishers, spotted, with its distinctive cry, and the small one, making a flash of blue and red as it dives in, to immediately emerge with a silver tiddler wriggling in its beak. The Cormorants, usually standing on a low bough hanging low over the water, their wings outstretched, drying before taking their next plunge, often emerged the other end with a fully grown Tilapia in their bills. You’d never think it could possibly fit down that slender neck. Our little pack of five dogs were fascinated by the cormorant’s antics. So when it was on one bough or the other, at either end, they’d all plunge in and swim, as fast as they could, to try to catch it. The cormorant would quietly dive in, swim underneath them and come up the other end. They’d swim about in confused circles, bumping into each other, dipping their heads in the water trying to look for it. Then one of them would spot it the other end, already with its wings stretched out and they’d charge off again when exactly the same thing would happen. This game would go on and on until the dogs were utterly exhausted. With their last ounce of energy they’d swim ashore and wearily haul themselves out, long tongues hanging, panting, heads down and flop on the grass around us. While all this life was going on, near and on the water, the deep beds of flowers attracted countless hummingbirds. Their bodies motionless mid-air, their wings beating in a blur, their long curved bills dipped deep into the flowers, to drink the delicious nectar. The soft hum of the bees busily collecting the pollen to make the honey we had every morning on the hot bread made every day by the cook, Churchy. The Bee-Eaters all sitting close together on the telephone line; somebody counted ninety-one varieties of birds in and around
the garden. My Sister and I lived and played in this paradise, looked after during the day by our beloved Ayah, Adijah, (Di-Di), and by night our beloved parents, all this magical beauty for the first nine years of our lives.
Why did it have to end, why was it I found myself in the middle of this awful dormitory, with bed after bed packed down each side. ‘Come on, come on,’ shouted a fat woman in a green dress, ‘choose a bed and don’t forget which one it is.’ She turned on her heel and slammed the door. I think that must have been the moment I put my mind in neutral and did what I was told, for four wasted years.